KZMU News: Tuesday June 9, 2020

As demonstrators across the nation continue demanding reforms for law enforcement, many communities large and small are beginning these conversations. Grand County Attorney Christina Sloan is the chief law enforcement official in the local community. Today on the news, we speak with her about how this national reckoning is pushing her office to look more closely at de-escalation policies and implicit bias training. The county is also planning to help host a community conversation on race with local law enforcement soon. We speak with Sloan on these efforts, and much more.

Listen to the interview above, and read along below.

KZMU INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINA SLOAN (06/08/20)

KZMU NEWS: I know the Grand County Attorney’s Office is responsible for a lot of legal functions of our community, including the review and prosecution of felonies, class A misdemeanor violations, giving legal advice to the county council and county departments, victims assistance to help victims through difficult and confusing legal proceedings…But for this conversation, I kind of want to point out how law enforcement agencies interact with the county attorney’s office because you as Grand County Attorney are the chief law enforcement official in the county, so I want to make sure that I understand how that structure works. And if you might explain the relationship between your office and law enforcement.

CHRISTINA SLOAN: I think you’ve summarized the duties well. From the big picture, I would say that I am responsible for enforcing our laws. I am an agent of the state of the attorney general’s office in particular. And so I am responsible for enforcing our laws – both local and state laws – and generally keeping the community safe. And you listed out a few ways to describe the community. So that’s our citizens. That’s our law abiding citizens. That’s our non-law abiding citizens. That’s our victims. That’s our law enforcement. It’s all of the above. So it’s certainly a big job. And, you know, the vastness of it is not lost on me.

From a day to day picture, what does that look like? I’m responsible for prosecuting crime and working with law enforcement to do it and I’m, I want to do it obviously in a just and fair way and law enforcement is crucial to that. Law enforcement is crucial to building a case and it’s a case you want to win. We don’t want to waste resources, if we’re not going to win. We also don’t want to harm people and burden people if we’re not going to win. If it wasn’t a good case, if there weren’t sufficient reasons to have made the stop, if there were any constitutional issues – we both want to uphold the rights of the suspects or the defendants. And we also don’t want to waste resources.

So, while I am a team with law enforcement, and I do want to shout out to our law enforcement – I think we do a great job here. And we often work hand in hand. But we also must and do push on law enforcement to be better when we think they need to be better. And of course, I have a chief deputy, Matt Brooks, who’s our lead prosecutor. But he and I do all that relationship building and that training together. And so we often do bring in individual officers or teams, they often work in teams to talk through a case gone bad, an investigation that’s not complete, a stop that should never have happened. We do that pretty regularly actually.

And I think that one other thing to clarify is that we prosecute all felonies and class A misdemeanors wherever they occur. But we also prosecute misdemeanors in the county. But misdemeanors in the city are handled by a city prosecutor.

KZMU NEWS: Thanks for clarifying that. That’s something that I often forget. So thank you.

So the reason I wanted to talk to you because of this broader national conversation that’s happening right now. And it’s kind of forcing and perhaps informing local conversations. So demonstrations are being held. We just had one a big one on Friday to demand a change to what many people are saying is a racist law enforcement system. Can you tell me how you understand this national sort of reckoning on a personal level, but also when it comes to your position as Grand County’s top law enforcement official?

CHRISTINA SLOAN: That is a huge question. And I don’t even really know where to start with it. But I do appreciate the movement and the importance of it. And the fact that there [have] been peaceful protests for a long time and things haven’t changed.

I put some of this information on my Facebook page, but I grew up in the south, and even the deep south – North Georgia. So I grew up in the 80s and the 90s. I was in high school in the mid 90s. I graduated 1996. And I saw massive racism. It was disgusting, and it was everywhere. And it was accepted by the white community. I don’t actually think in my school we had…we were about 15% Black and my school and I actually think we were quite unified and I didn’t feel racial tension. Now that’s coming from the perspective of the white girl. I didn’t feel it.

But had a number of talented Black athletes and we would go to other schools and there was massive open racial protesting. So you would have a Black girl go to the line to throw a three pointer. And they would literally come out with nooses. They would make Ku Klux Klan hats out of newspapers. You had some schools – when they announced the starters, when they would name the people as they’re coming out, all the starters would run out carrying an enormous confederate flag. I remember one time…when there is a flag that was brought out there was as big as the audience on the other side of the court. And I would say it’s about the size of our bleachers at the football stadium on the other side of the field.

So I certainly have seen it. I was very sensitive to it. And I left the south as soon as I could. And that was one reason why. The N word was prevalent. My family, not my immediate family, but my extended family would use it. And I wanted to get out. And I go to Boston, where I think, ‘oh, there’s enlightenment here.’ And my freshman year roommate was a Black woman who was grown up in the Northeast and who was just as frustrated and felt racially oppressed and was very vocal and very strong. And she was very involved in Black American movement issues at the time. We’re talking about the late 90s in Boston. And I learned a lot. That it’s not a southern issue. And it’s not a Southern Baptist issue, which I quite frankly, in high school really blamed the Southern Baptist Church for perpetuating racism. And I realized like, ‘wow it’s happening in other places.’ You know, largely informed by my roommate and the respect I had for her, I took a ton of Black American history and literature classes. I did my work at the time.

And then I found the West, and I just fell into my white little world. And, climbed and biked and decided to stay out West. I moved to white Wyoming and then I moved to white Colorado, and now I’m in white Utah. And, you know, I haven’t done my work over these past few years. And I have started, again to read up on anti-racism and what I can do. And what’s interesting is that this sort of white privileged, progressive society is just as damaging and perpetuates racism just as much as those white Southern racists that I couldn’t stand growing up.

So I appreciate the movement. I appreciate my role in it. I certainly appreciate law enforcement’s role in it as well. And I think that it is important in our community to review policies. What I don’t want to see as a whole lot of red tape where it doesn’t make sense. And so, you know, I appreciate a genuine conversation about it. And I think in a lot of communities, you need massive reform. I don’t think that’s true here. But I’m willing to listen and engage in that I could be wrong and there are some things I’m working with the Sheriff’s office in particular to potentially change. But it’s a really important moment for America to listen. Listen and do the work and check in.

KZMU NEWS: Thank you so much for going through all of that. This moment is kind of making everybody look at their own personal biases, and then what’s going on in their own communities. And with regard to our local law enforcement…So some of the demonstrators that I talked to on Friday, they wanted to know about anti-bias training, they wanted to know about de-escalation policies, they wanted to know if you know, this proclamation that the mayor and [Moab City Police] Chief [Bret] Edge just put out was going to be, you know, just a publicity stunt or if there’s going to be teeth behind it.

 So you know, from your perspective, what can we do in this moment, like, what do we need to be looking at with our local law enforcement when it comes to these policies that are kind of being thrown out there on a nationwide scale when it comes to anti-racism?

CHRISTINA SLOAN: I think you know, starting at the local level, the proclamation. I was not consulted about that in advance. I do think there’s a big disconnect at the city about the relationship of me and my office and MPD. And that is something we’ve been working on but I wouldn’t say is – oh, as healthy as I would like it to be at this point. So I can’t speak to what the city is doing and what the intent of their proclamation is or where they go with it. So I hope that it’s not just a media stunt.

But I will say that Evan Clapper, [county] councilman Clapper, came to me and said, ‘are we going to do a similar proclamation? What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to do something to pander to the media and have a moment. I’m interested in a real conversation. And I’m glad you’re interested and I think a lot of the community is so let’s have a real conversation with law enforcement. And let’s invite the Multicultural Center. And let’s get into it and let’s let people ask any questions they have about how we’re handling it. Because I do think our policies are good, I think our training is good. I think our law enforcement is solid. And let’s talk about it.’ So we are planning…a conversation on race with law enforcement and with the Multicultural Center.  

But I hope that will be interesting. You know, we obviously have a use of force policy, which is the same one MPD does, which is the same one a lot of communities have. It is somewhat broad, and I have had that conversation with law enforcement also with Matt Brooks, my chief deputy to say why don’t we integrate more use continuum specifics in here? And across the board, I’m told that’s not the right thing. You need to rely on an officer’s training. Because when they implement their training in a hard situation, they are going to come to this place where they’re acting like a reasonable officer would in this situation given all the circumstances. And what you don’t want to do – because it wouldn’t just threaten law enforcement lives, it would threaten victims lives and bystanders lives if you start trying to micromanage what that reaction is when you’re not there and in the moment. So the standard is always this reasonableness, and you want to give the officer all the tools to figure out what that is.

Obviously, in the case of George Floyd’s death, that officer ignored his training. That was murder. Absolutely. So I think our policy is sufficient, but it’s something we’ll discuss at this meeting. It’s something I’ve discussed with my prosecutor; I’ve discussed with the Sheriff.

Anti-bias training. I took an implicit bias training [in] 2018. And it was really wonderful. I have a very bad attitude about training, I think largely it is a huge waste of time and resource. But this was one of the best things I’ve done. And it was really interesting too. As a person who doesn’t feel like I have racist tendencies. As a person who works hard on, you know, relationships with diverse groups of people, I was surprised by what I learned about myself. And interestingly, my observations are not as much about race as accents. So I realized how badly people with accidents in the court system are prejudiced, because we don’t want to give them the time of day. We don’t want to work hard to even understand what they’re saying. So we start to dismiss them, and we start to listen and rely on the white voice. So that was my big light bulb was the accent issue, which of course is related to race and culture. My chief prosecutor I realized has not done that implicit bias training, so I’m going to make sure to get that done. And even though law enforcement does have some of this basic training in their POST [Utah Peace Officer Standards and Training] certification, there isn’t a requirement to keep it up. And so that is something absolutely – I’ve already been talking to the Sheriff about and he’s one-hundred percent supportive of getting more of this implicit bias or unconscious bias training more regularly.

I’ll say too, that I have taken some issues with some policies and some biases [that] I see with law enforcement. In my opinion, it has been gender based. And you will see, for example, police get called out to a domestic violence incident. And within one minute, the man’s in handcuffs. Well, they haven’t even come into survey – is the man actually the aggressor or not? They don’t wait. And then they don’t even do a full investigation. And these are exceptions, but it happens. They don’t do full investigations to actually prove that the man was the aggressor. They just listened to the woman because of bias and they don’t see it that way at all. So we’re pushing that way, Matt Brooks and I. There was a sexual harassment case I think was horribly messed up at the county. Horribly messed up. It was before my time, but there was a whole lot of gender bias in that sexual harassment investigation.

Obviously, the use of certain words that are discriminating against women are used all the time in law enforcement, and I will stand up every time. I say that not to minimalize the issues that are before us with race, but to say – I am hard on law enforcement when I see an issue and so is Matt Brooks. Absolutely. I don’t think we have a use of force issue here. And I don’t think we have a racial profiling issue here.

KZMU NEWS: Well, thank you for going through what you have seen because I think other people [at the demonstration] were saying, sure, maybe Moab doesn’t have similar issues that you know, other cities are struggling with across the country but there are issues here. What are those? And can we hold our law enforcement officers accountable to be better.

CHRISTINA SLOAN: Right. And a couple of things like the de-escalation training. I talked with our jail commander Shan Hackwell. He had a great idea. [In] corrections [facilities], unless you’re in a very fancy prison with locked down components, you are not allowed to have a gun in the jail. Because of that, you learn de-escalation techniques that you have to hone it. You have to learn it and hone it. Because you can’t rely on the gun or you can’t rely on any other dangerous weapon to help control someone.

The training that corrections officers receive is different than the training that law enforcement receives. And why isn’t that a combined training, that de-escalation training? It is different between the two tracks and there are two different certificates. So that was something that Shan brought up as a policy level from the state. And our Sheriff is absolutely working with the Association of Sheriffs and with various folks in the [Attorney General’s] office, there are bills that are being proposed right now. And the Sheriff has been involved in those. And I think that’s a great thing that all of our patrol law enforcement should have to take that same de-escalation training.

Another one is – not all jurisdictions do this, but we give every single officer coming into the office a polygraph to confirm their application, [and] make sure they’re trustworthy. Because it is such a job that comes with such ethical responsibility, and we take that very seriously. So the Sheriff is going to work with our polygraph maker and taker to come up with some questions that would get at implicit bias or overt racism even. To that into our polygraph system. And are there other ways to catch some of these issues in the screening process – that’s a conversation we’ve had that I think is a great one.

There’s a lot of call for defunding police departments. I don’t support that. Quite frankly, these are positions that are low paid. So, you know, can we restructure police officers? Are there military states some places where there’s too many police officers? Maybe. I don’t see it here. I don’t see that we’re in that position. Instead, last I looked, police officers with Moab City made $17 an hour starting. Our officers [at Grand County Sheriff’s Office] make $21 an hour starting. Their retirement benefits have been dramatically cut in the last few years. I personally don’t want the guys with the guns being the lowest paid people in the community. You’re not going to attract the type of people and those sort of good ethical career folks, if positions are lower paid. And I’m sure there’s fat in budgets…. but I don’t think as a systematic approach, defunding police departments or Sheriff’s Office departments is the solution.

Because I think one of the biggest issues here is civil servant act reform. It is almost impossible to get rid of bad cops. That’s the problem. They have all these civil servant protections we can get into that. But I do think if you’ve cut budgets – it is so expensive. It is at least a three year process to get rid of a bad cop. And that’s just like a not so good cop. That doesn’t mean like a murderer. You’re three years in. And so if you’re defunding budgets, it’s a very expensive process, so that’s just going to make the process of getting rid of bad cops even harder because you won’t have the resources to actually do it.

So to break that down at the investigation level…and this is how ours work by policy, it’s how MPD’s work by policy. It’s my understanding this is how most of them work in Utah. We would have a local investigation of an issue. That could be absolutely any sort of critical incident involving law enforcement where there’s not any sort of complaint, but it was a major incident.

KZMU NEWS: [A critical incident] triggers a review, right?

CHRISTINA SLOAN: It triggers a review. Or any complaint. Whether it’s a citizen complaint or a defendant complaint, or a complaint from another officer – we do investigate all the complaints. We investigate first at the local level to ensure that there’s a real issue there. And that it is worthy of elevating the complaint. Then we work with an outside agency and it depends on the incident. So if it’s a critical incident, that’s going to be SBI, that’s our state Bureau of Investigation.

KZMU NEWS: And by ‘critical’ do you mean there’s a death or major injury?

CHRISTINA SLOAN: Exactly, yeah. Or even discharge of a dangerous weapon, which doesn’t happen very often here but that would also trigger it.

Any other complaint would go to an outside agency, typically a sister county. And then they review it for us. Then POST, which is the licensing board for law enforcement, they do their own investigation, no matter what the level of complaint is. And it it’s completely independent of the local and the outside agency. They start from the beginning. They come to town, they bring investigators, they interview people.

The process of those two tracks, I’d say on average takes about a year. And that is an officer who is sometimes on unpaid leave, but often is on paid leave because we haven’t made an assessment yet about whether the charges are accurate. Then you have an administrative appeal, at least at the county level. Now the city is controlled by different statutes. I’m talking about the county process, which is what I’m familiar with. You have administrative appeal in our county before the county council. In the bigger counties there is what’s called a Merit Service Commission which is essentially the Civilian Review Board already, it’s already operating in bigger counties. And I wouldn’t say it’s working any better than what we have. But it would go to the county council. That takes, I’d say, at a minimum six months to get there. It’s an informal process. It is an administrative hearing, but it does act and look like a trial. So you have discovery, and you have witness prep, and you have all that stuff. So I would say six months at a minimum, and that’s more like probably six to 12.

And then you have litigation that starts. So I mean, we’re two years in before we even get to the litigation track, and that’s just to get rid a so-so cop. Or a so-so deputy. So I think that’s a huge issue. And it’s also a really complicated one to try to reform because there is a lot of U.S. Supreme Court law, Utah Supreme Court law, that protects our civil servants. It’s a big massive issue, and I can’t say it’s anything easy, but I would recommend people write their state legislators and ask for Civil Servant Act reform. I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone asked for defunding departments without also asking for this reform. It’s got to happen in hand.

KZMU NEWS: For civilian review boards, a lot of the criticism is that many of them are often kind of toothless, like they’re not able to do much. So this civil servant reform that’s what you think people should be focusing on?

CHRISTINA SLOAN: Yeah. Which is really a different issue, right? That’s about the protections. If we fire someone in the Recorder’s Office, they can appeal and go to the county council and that’s in the county council can hear it or not. You’re an at-will employee you have no protection, whereas law enforcement has all sorts of protections and it’s very hard to get rid of someone so it is different.

The civilian review boards. I do think that if they are to be effective, like you say, it needs to be trained individuals with investigative and subpoena power. And that’s hard to pull off, you know, in a community…They tend to be political. You know, I’m very cautious about setting up a situation where it becomes a political board of, you know, the Moab hate machine that’s reviewing cases from a point of view with no experience.

So, what I would support is a state level review board that reviews the investigation once complete. I don’t want the state in our business. I’m always going to say it – let us lead the investigation, let us contact our outside agency, but once we’ve deemed it complete, I think it would be great to have a state board then review that investigation and so far that doesn’t happen automatically. But certainly we can request it. Anyone can request it. But from my experience, from what I’ve seen so far is that doesn’t occur very often at all.

…I’ve seen the draft of a Colorado law that’s also being shopped around in Utah, which would create a statewide board that would investigate all complaints. And to me, that’s an overreach of state power. I don’t want that here. But I can absolutely support a review board that reviews our investigations.

KZMU NEWS: So I think it would be an omission if I didn’t mention the past because it may – or perhaps really should – inform the present…In 2016, there were five internal affairs investigations conducted on four officers specifically at the Moab Police Department. The State Bureau of Investigation also got involved, POST was there, the FBI even did a short review, but ultimately decided not to pursue a case. So three of those officers left the Moab Police Department. One of those officers came back to the PD.

 So these 2016 investigations came around the same time that your predecessor, Andrew Fitzgerald, said that he could not trust certain officers on the stand. He accused certain officers of being compromised or perhaps even lying under oath. So Fitzgerald effectively said that he was forced to dismiss over a dozen if not more cases where those officers were involved. Now at the time, you were a defense attorney for one of these officers that your predecessor called a problem. That officer subsequently went through an IA and ultimately left the local PD. He was also subject to an investigation by POST and that agency cleared him of all charges.

 I was the staff writer at The Times-Independent at the time, and I wrote a number of articles on this issue. And I’m just going to quote you because in one of them, you acknowledge that your client had made some “bad judgments.” But you went on to say, “mistakes are inevitable when your police force is comprised of young, undertrained and underpaid officers like Moab’s.”

 I think it’s relevant now for several reasons. Because, at the time, I had many conversations with Andrew Fitzgerald and others familiar with our local criminal justice system, and they all kind of intimated to me that it’s the system that sort of allows bad behavior. And that kind of dovetails into this national moment, because more and more people don’t want to hear the ‘bad apple’ argument. They want to tear it down and rebuild the entire barrel.  So that’s a long winded way of getting to a place where I hope you could comment on the somewhat recent past and how you think it could inform changes going forward.

CHRISTINA SLOAN: Yeah, that is a big question. I want to say from the outset that the officer I represented was cleared of all charges by POST. I’m actually not sure who the fourth officer is, but I’m well aware of three of the four that you’re referring to. And the three of the four – two were involved in one incident, and [the other] was a totally separate investigation of different issues. None of them related to any of the issues that we’re talking about on the national level. So none were related to use of force, none were related to racial profiling. None were related to an overreach of law enforcement. One was related to taxes and tax evasion, and the other one was related to an unfortunate incident that happened at the home or the neighbor’s home of one of the officers. So they’re very different issues and I just want to make that point.

I think that the leadership of our law enforcement agencies – so MPD and the Sheriff’s Office are crucial. And at the time, we had no leadership in the police [department] and we hadn’t for a long time. And of course, I’m talking about [former] Chief [Mike] Navarre. And I’ll say it, because I don’t want that statement to be attributed to anyone else. I also think there is a big disconnect at the city, because the police chief is appointed and he’s not elected. So you don’t have this moment where there’s a review every four years by the community to determine if this is still the person that should be there. And there has been a huge disconnect in the past between city administration and MPD. And there shouldn’t be because MPD is under administration, unlike the county, where our Sheriff of course is elected official.

And so I don’t think there had been appropriate reviews, appropriate oversight, appropriate training, appropriate leadership in MPD for a long time before my officer got in trouble. And I think that has changed. Of course [former] Chief [Jim] Winder came in and really did some amazing things. I was sad to see him go – we weren’t quite ready for him to go; we needed a little bit more of his expertise. But he really set us on this right trajectory. And [current] Chief [Bret] Edge has been right there to help lead his office in a much more active way than we’ve seen a long time.

Similarly, Joel Linares, who’s the city manager as a prior prosecutor, eight years, so he does have this great perspective. Now he’s super busy, and I’ve had to, like, ring his ear a few times about some issues. But I will say city administration is more involved than they ever have been, at least, you know, in decades, I’d say with MPD.

And then on the county side. You know, Bill Stone, you remember that guy? He was great, he was never going to win, but it was a great thing. That’s why we have elections is to challenge status quo. He wanted to combine the city PD and the Sheriff’s Office. I’m not sure that’s the right thing. But I think it’s a great conversation. He really dug into budgets and got some information out there about the Sheriff’s Office budget. He caused a turnover in the Sheriff’s Office because the prior Sheriff didn’t want to run against him. So that’s the kind of thing you’ll see at the county level, where you have these elections and elections are brutal for one. And it’s an answering to the community.

The same thing happened in my race. You know, my predecessor, certainly, in his second term, arguably, in his first did not put a lot of time into a robust prosecution system and team. And so I felt like there was a mandate to take it seriously, be tougher on crime.

And I do want to talk about some of our crime rates because the majority of our crime are white locals with substance abuse problems. And we have a lot of the crimes that you see in low income, predominantly white areas, which is domestic violence, and sexual abuse of children. And my predecessor, I believe, was not tough enough on these local issues, and that that was a mandate that I had coming in. And so I do feel like I have an obligation. And I think Matt Brooks is just a wonderful asset to the community. Because he has done that. We’re taking more things to trial; we’re taking more things for preliminary hearing. We had our first murder trial last year in decades, I think since the late 90s…that, of course, was a crime between two Hispanic individuals – a drug deal gone bad. There was a lot of concern that we would not do the right thing for our victim because he was Hispanic, because he was a drug dealer. But the point is – enforce the laws in a just way. And we did that.

And you see the same thing going on right now with the Camey death/homicide. And we’ve worked very hard to honor Vilsar and Isreal [Camey] and making sure there’s justice in that case. We still have not settled that case.

I had the jail commander give me some statistics that I think are interesting. I have two time periods. One is in the last year. And then I have the last four years. We house state inmates in our Moab jail, which a lot of people don’t realize. We tend to have about six to eight at one time, and they’re almost always female state inmates. So these are prison inmates from up north that we house here. It’s a pretty typical thing that small jails do. The state does pay us money, so we do pretty well with these state inmates.

So for the last year, on average, each day in the jail, we’ve had 35 inmates or less. Seventy percent have been men and thirty percent have been women. Of that amount [on a daily basis], sixty-six percent are white, thirteen-percent are Native American, twelve-percent are Hispanic, five-percent are Black, three-percent are Asian, and one-percent is unknown or Hawaiian Pacific Islander. It’s pretty similar stats over the last four-year period. In the last four years we were tracking seventy-eight percent male, twenty-two percent female. Sixty-four percent white, eighteen-percent Native American, ten-percent Hispanic, three-percent Black, two-percent Asian and three-percent unknown or Hawaiian Pacific Islander. Now this is people in jail. So these are felonies, class A [misdemeanors], or probation violations for other misdemeanors. But these are kind of the bad things. And I think that it still tells the story that our issues are predominantly white in substance abuse space here.

KZMU NEWS: Thank you for preparing those numbers. This conversation…coming up soon with local law enforcement on race. Are you going to be coming to this with an open ear? What’s your approach when it comes to this important conversation?

CHRISTINA SLOAN: For me, I think it’s about education. I think that we’re doing the right thing, and we want to let the community know that. So we want to talk through our use of force policy, and we want to talk through our training. We want to talk through the stats. WE want to talk through where we have pushed. For example, where I was talking about the gender bias, it’s a place we’ve pushed.

Another example of that is children who’ve been sexually abused go through a very specific interview process with a specific interviewer who has been trained. And if it’s done at the Children’s Justice System in this controlled environment, the testimony can actually be used in court without live testimony, which is unusual.

KZMU NEWS: You don’t have to bring a child into the courtroom.

CHRISTINA SLOAN: Right. Unfortunately, it is often a female victim and a male officer, which is hard enough. And it’s often a male officer who works at the school or School Resource Officer, and that is not okay. You cannot force that girl to relive the trauma of the incident or the interview, which can be just as traumatizing…ask her to relive that. So there are policies we’re pushing on.

And so for me, it’s about a moment to hear a community conversation, for sure. But I think that people will appreciate the information they’re told. And then again, we have been reviewing stuff, the Sheriff has been really wonderful and really receptive to that. And of course, it’s a few of us, listening to the collective voice, but having conversations and so there could be great ideas out there. [Ideas] that make sense, that are efficient, that are not just red tape for the sake of the conversation, but that actually make sense. And so that de-escalation training that Shan said, ‘yeah why doesn’t everyone have the training corrections has?’ Enhancing our pre-screening techniques and making sure that we have more implicit bias training both in the county attorney’s office and in our law enforcement departments more regularly. I did reach out to the city to find out about their implicit bias training [but] haven’t heard back from them yet. I have a feeling it’s similar to the Sheriff’s Office.

Show Notes:

Transcript of the 6/8 Christina Sloan Interview

Grand County Attorney’s Office
www.grandcountyutah.net/506/Attorney

Mayor Issues Community Proclamation 
moabcity.org/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=312

2017 Archive: The Times-Independent, City vows to pursue source of leaked IA reports involving police officers
moabtimes.com/2017/02/09/2736191…g-police-officers/

Hundreds of Moab protestors call for an end to police brutality, systemic racism
www.kzmu.org/kzmu-news-monday-june-8-2020/